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The Importance of Being Right: Comments on Eugene Peterson’s The Message

Oscar Wilde’s hilarious play, ‘The Importance of Being Earnest,’
focuses our attention on a particular virtue.
But being earnest does not hold a candle to being right! Being sincere counts for nothing if one is
sincerely wrong. This, in a word,
captures the problem with Eugene Peterson’s The
Message. Personal perspectives on
Scripture simply cannot replace careful Bible translation and interpretation any
more than they should guide pastoral care based on the truth.

Eugene Peterson has been in the news this past week about a
flip-flop on his views on homosexuality, and then a simple wave of his hand at
the issue—a major embarrassment for anyone in either pastoral ministry or
theological education, let alone both.[1] Yet his error goes deeper—even to altering
the Scriptures themselves. His opinion
on homosexuality is actually not important to the Church, though his ramblings
will, no doubt, injure some people’s faith.
An individual scholar’s opinions, though, are simply not relevant to the
Church’s unchanging witness through the centuries to the truth or the
authoritative teaching of Scripture on an issue. Consider how Peterson’s Biblical paraphrase, The Message, handled key New Testament
texts that deal with homosexuality.

Romans 1:26-27

The Message

Romans 1.26 Worse
followed. Refusing to know God, they soon didn't know how to be human either -
women didn't know how to be women, men didn't know how to be men. 27 Sexually
confused, they abused and defiled one another, women with women, men with men -
all lust, no love. And then they paid for it, oh, how they paid for it -
emptied of God and love, godless and loveless wretches.

The New Revised
Standard Version

Romans 1:26-27 For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women
exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural,
27 and in the same way also the men, giving up natural
intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men
committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due
penalty for their error.

Peterson’s rendering
of the text obscures the issue of lesbianism in verse 26. In verse 27, he focuses the problem on abuse
and lust rather than the acts themselves.
Even the NRSV’s more literal translation is not as helpful as it might
have been. It translates ‘natural use’
with ‘natural intercourse.’ This is a
decent translation, to be sure, but the word ‘use’ is actually an important
part of Paul’s point, since he is talking about the use of sexual organs
according to their natural purpose.
Whether or not we might believe that the NRSV needs improvement,
Peterson’s paraphrase totally misses the point.

1 Corinthians 6:9

The Message
1 Corinthians 6.9 Don't you realize that this is not the way to live? Unjust
people who don't care about God will not be joining in his kingdom. Those who
use and abuse each other, use and abuse sex….

New Revised Standard
Version

Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not
be deceived! Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites….

The two words that address homosexuality in 1 Corinthians 6.9
are ‘malakoi’—‘soft men’—and ‘arsenokoitai’—‘men going to bed with
men’. The first word, ‘malakoi’, fits into a major discussion
in ancient philosophy about people who lack self-control, particularly in
sexual matters. It was also further used
in reference to men with a homosexual, feminine orientation.[2] This is how Paul uses the word in a list of
three sexual sins: adultery, soft
men, and men having sex with men.

The second word appears to have been Paul’s own creation—a
compound of the words ‘men’ and ‘bed’ (a euphemism for sex in Greek as in
English). The words are found together in Leviticus 20.13, to which Paul is undoubtedly alluding. (Old Testament sexual ethics remain in place for the Church.) The word essentially means
‘men bedders’ and focusses on the act of homosexual intercourse rather than, as
malakoi, on the orientation and its
consequences for a person’s whole disposition in life. The correct translation of these words has
escaped translators far too often, sadly.
The English Standard Version, for example, simply collapses the two
terms into ‘men who practice homosexuality’.
The New Revised Standard Version limits ‘malakoi’ far too much. It is
possible to understand one example of ‘soft men’ as those men who receive sex
from another man, and some of these people were male prostitutes. Yet the word is far broader than this single
category, and it could lead some people to think that the issue is really about
prostitution when ‘prostitute’ is not in the Greek text at all!

The second term, ‘arsenokoitai,’
is translated as ‘sodomites’ in the New Revised Standard Version. ‘Sodomites’ is a term for homosexuals with a
lengthy history, since the men of Sodom in Genesis 19 sought to engage in
homosexual sex with Lot’s visitors. The
problem with this translation in 1 Corinthians 6.9 is that it brings Genesis 19
into focus, whereas this is not the case.
Moreover, some interpreters of Genesis 19 have tried to understand the
passage to mean anything but homosexuality!
While these alternative understandings are certainly wrong, use of
‘Sodomites’ in 1 Corinthians 6.9 could lead a reader who is familiar with these
mistaken views on Genesis 19 to think Paul is talking about something other
than homosexuality. Again, he does not
say ‘Sodomites’ but ‘men having sex with other men’ (with no distinction
between those receiving or those giving the sex, as some interpreters have
suggested for these two words in this passage).

These problems with
translations pale, however, when one turns to The Message. The rendering
of the verse is completely botched. The
two words under discussion that capture aspects of homosexuality are totally
obscured: the reader does not even know the subject of homosexuality is in
view.

As with Peterson’s
rendering of 1 Corinthians 6.9, one is not aware in 1 Timothy 1.10 that Paul is
presenting a sin list. Persons needing
to see that the early Church and New Testament authors opposed the slave trade
will not see this in The Message’s
paraphrase of the verse. Nor will they
see that this verse affirms what was said in the sin list of 1 Corinthians 1.9
about homosexual men going to bed with one another. Paul uses the same complex word, arsenokoitai, as in 1 Corinthians 6.9.

Jude 7

The Message

Jude 7 Sodom and
Gomorrah, which went to sexual rack and ruin along with the surrounding cities
that acted just like them, are another example. Burning and burning and never
burning up, they serve still as a stock warning.

The New Revised
Standard Version

Jude 7 Likewise, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which, in
the same manner as they, indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural
lust, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.

As with his handling of Romans 1.26-27, Peterson focuses on sexual excess
in his rendering of Jude 7: ‘burning and burning’. He catches the connection between Sodom and
sexual immorality, but he misses the ‘unnatural lust’ picked up by the New
Revised Standard Version. The word
‘lust’ is not in the Greek, but the New Revised Standard Version does point the
reader to the issue of the unnatural act
of homosexuality by its translation of ‘other flesh’ in the Greek.[3]

Conclusion

Thus, we see a consistent re-interpretation of New Testament texts on
homosexuality by Peterson in the New Testament. The problem begins already with the choice to
produce a paraphrase rather than encourage people to use a translation. One of the most distressing things to see is
a ‘seasoned’ Christian walking around with a paraphrase like The Message. This suggests an ignorance of the difference
between Bible translations and paraphrases.
The Message is not a Bible
translation and should not be used for Bible reading or Bible study. A paraphrase is closer to being a commentary.

Even so, Peterson’s handling of key New Testament texts on homosexuality
suggest that his personal views come out in his paraphrase. It is very difficult to avoid the conclusion
that Peterson intended to undermine the meaning of the text in his paraphrase
and, perhaps, thereby indicate his rejection of the text of Scripture.

[3]To his credit, Peterson does
capture the focus of the parallel text of Jude 7 in 2 Peter 2. He does not opt to focus on sexual excess in
this passage but renders verse 7’s reference to Sodom as ‘sexual filth and
perversity’. (The New Revised Standard
Version has ‘the licentiousness of the lawless’.)